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Competition Will Not Be Tolerated
Fellow member Dave S. posted a short note this morning about the government forcing ITT to shut down its technical school operation. In it he asks “Do they actually hold other private ‘not-for-profit’ institutions to the same standard or I am just falling in to the trap of ‘this administration can do no right?'”
The reality is that Progressives really do not care whether an organization is “for profit” or not. What they care about is getting their cut, both of control and money. They have turned the Federal government into an organized crime extortion ring. The Department of “Education” goes after trade schools and charter schools. The Department of “Justice” goes after churches and other religious organizations who don’t play ball on abortion or ObamaCare. The IRS harasses conservative political organizations.
In this case, post secondary education in America is the new Industrial Titan. Americans spend $1.1 trillion on “education” every year. And a lot of people are making a profit.
An oppressed minority heads the compensation list of American University Presidents
Take Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson. Dr. Jackson (an obviously oppressed Woman of Color™) served as Chairman of The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission under President Bill Clinton. She is now the 18th President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). In 2012, she had to make do on a crappy annual salary of $945,000. But somehow, when all the bonuses and other incentives are added up she has to scape along on a mere $7.1 million.
Dr. Jackson serves on an array of federal government commissions all while raising over $1.4 billion for RPI’s capital expenditure plan, including the largest single unrestricted gift in school history worth $360 million. However, that gift was anonymous. How does anyone handle that much money anonymously?
Picking on one person is easy. So, lets take the totality of the University of California system. The most recent figures available show that these 10 schools paid its combined staffs $12.6 billion dollars. For tax purposes, these are non-productive salaries. They are paid out in tax-payer dollars so anything that comes back to California in income taxes is just a return. In the private sector that’s called a “kickback.” And that’s typical across the country. The University of Oklahoma pays out an annual $428 million in salaries. And those numbers don’t include benefits like tuition credits to employees and their families.
And then there’s university athletics. More often than not, the highest paid public employee in a state is going to be either a football or basketball coach. The total compensation paid to Division I football coaches this year will be a staggering $242,907,796. The top 61 basketball coaches will pocket $107,155,387.
For the record, here is what the five “Power Conferences” brought in last year from their television contracts:
| SEC | $478,000,000 |
| Big Ten | $386,000,000 |
| ACC | $331,000,000 |
| Pac-12 | $307,000,000 |
| Big 12 | $253,000,000 |
The government has gotten generations of young people indoctrinated into socialism through the “education” system. And the NCAA sports serves a dual purpose. First, because there are massive amounts of money involved, there is Title IX. Threatening this revenue stream gives the Feds a handle on the old “short and curlies.” They can force the university systems to do just about anything. Secondly, they serve as the ultimate distractionary maneuver. We tolerate the harm they’re doing to our children and the nation as a whole as long as our favorite collegiate football and basketball teams are competitive.
When you look at the size of these numbers, such places as ITT and DeVry are pikers, a mere drop in the bucket. Saving the public from the “predatory” is the least of their motives. It’s just a shot across the bow to everyone else. Get in line and stay in line. Nice little organization youse gots around here, it would be shamefuls if anyting happened toos it…
Published in Education
You were generous in noting just two federal departments, EJ. (I mean, how long do we want an OP to be??) We only need to look at the EPA and Treasury to know that if we took the time, we could identify measures of totalitarian and insidious actions. I don’t know where it ends . . .
Don’t get me started on university athletics. This year the school I go to had a student vote on whether to join division 1 of the NCAA up from division 2. In a time of overcrowding classes, high tuition, sometimes poor classes, and an already successful lower div sports program, they opted to raise the athletics fee over 300$ a year.
Except, something between 1/3-2/3 of that fee increase was to go toward financial aid to cover the fee for “people who couldn’t afford it”.
In my opinion, all public schools should be banned from having competitive sports that have any income (intramural or intercollegiate that are mostly for fun and receive no TV, ticket, or other revenue are okay because it is good for students to get exercise especially with the stress of college). Also, no one should be allowed to give tax deductible donations to schools that are earmarked for sports only.
Schools should have sports facilities for the health (and enjoyment) of students only. The government should get out of the business of selling the labor of students as they play sports for donations and the business of being a minor league or scouting league for many major profitable sports in America.
Liberals and Obama have been on a jag terrorizing Private-For-Profit schools for a while. Why? The words “Private” and “Profit” naturally–they’re liberals–but also “Unions” and “Big Education”. It started with accreditation and is now working its magic. School-Choice is a no-no even at the college level.
What does college coaches salaries have to day with all this? That’s an apples and oranges argument.
It’s the totality of the post-secondary education system. It’s the fact that “non-profit” is anything but. It’s big business.
Yes, they are totalitarians to the core. Sports are -part of the market economy and don’t bother me as much as the political extortion and rent seeking that governs the rest of education, regulation, energy policy and counter cyclical spending. We’d benefit if it were all blown up.
Even leaving aside athletics, I worked at a small New England college for 5 years. A microcosm of what goes on in larger schools, especially state schools, they quite happily paid ridiculous salaries to people I would now kindly describe as idiots who would not be able to hold a job in the “private” sector.
Why? Because they can. When demand outstrips supply, you can charge whatever you want (almost), and people will sign up and pay it, willingly, because they think they have to.
The results are administrative-heavy labor forces that do not teach a student one thing. I’ll just leave the general curricula out of this discussion as well, in terms of what does not get taught. Working in a fundraising office, and seeing how the higher levels of the administration act (because they are expected to do some fund-raisin’) was an eye opener. I thought it was bad; I had no idea how bad.
And the kicker: The bulk of them think that anyone who’s conservative is a monster. Literally, a monster. The president of the college once said (paraphrasing) to an auditorium filled with staff and faculty “I can’t believe anyone would vote for an idiot”, meaning George Bush.
Kind of makes me want to pimp-slap the stupid out of these lazy, paunchy leeches, since, let’s be honest here, there’s not one fighter in the lot of them.
We continue to get what we deserve, good and hard.
EJ,
Hey there fella, didn’t you know “What’s good for Big Academia is good for America”. Just go with the flow and don’t make waves. There’s plenty of Grant Money, Sucker Alumni, and Sucker Parents to pay for it and trample each other trying to get the kids in. Sooner or later it’s the taxpayers that will foot the bill too. Ever more twisted ideology and ever lower standards just kind of go hand in hand. Who’s gonna question Harvard?
This giant carnival of evil has been getting worse and worse for years. I see that our sister of color is being held back to the tune of $7.1 million per year. Not since Hercules cleaned the Augean Stables has this much sh#t needed to be flushed.
Regards,
Jim
What a coincidence! RPI happens to be my Alma mater (2008). None of the skills I use in my day-to-day job were derived from my major (for some reason, I don’t have a fresh stack of differential equations on my desk each morning). Most of the applicable skills I learned were self-taught or the product of an excellent computer networking academy, which they decided to discontinue this year.
Naturally, the only explanations I have seen for the closing are political — then, as is the case now, the IT focus of those courses was frowned upon (I took them as electives, not counting towards my engineering major tract). Of course, the thought does not occur to Dr. Jackson that there are companies who are very interested in hiring graduates who are capable of solving complex engineering problems but prefer practical applications of their skills in the business world, rather than academia.
I don’t mean to bash the school, the connections I made there and the academy they previously ran helped me get started with an excellent job and career I love. I would highly recommend RPI to any prospective student. Just keep in mind, despite its commitment to hard sciences, it has still been infected with politics.
The number of non-academic student services at a typical college has also grown out of control. I see the point of having dormitories and a cafeteria for undergrads, especially for colleges located in high rent areas.
But if a student wants to play sports on his own time, then join a for-fun sports league in the community. Want to go get a pizza at 8pm after the cafeteria closes?
Rock climbing, bowling, pool (ok, maybe there’s a pool table in the dorm area); go off campus. Why have those distractions on campus? You’re supposed to be studying.
Yeah, if you’re going to go with the totality of the argument, then you throw athletics into the mix. Especially since most schools don’t make money on athletics. In fairness, in schools where there is no real money being raised in sports don’t pay their coaches more than, say, $150K a year, and usually a lot less.
I happen to be a season ticket holder for the hockey program at the University of Alaska. And I would be sad if they canceled it on general academic principles (and as it happens, athletics is being looked at there). But I wouldn’t fight it. I can’t justify it. And when I was a student there, I never went.
Varsity sports originally started at private colleges. I believe they started with the Ivy League. They should never have been adopted by public tax payer funded universities.
While this is a fair argument and I would not fight too hard to keep sports facilities on campus, you might want to think about the practicality of making students go off campus.
Most students in crowded cities don’t have cars, especially the first year. So, if a student wants to play sports, they would have to walk/bus potentially miles to get to a sports facility that would likely not be that good if run by the city (remember that students don’t pay taxes to the city so I doubt that city administrators would bend over backwards to make good facilities for students). Otherwise, students would need to find a for profit sports facility and in some areas, there are not likely to be any that are affordable.
So, removing basic sports facilities (gym, fields, tennis courts, basketball courts, etc…) would significantly interfere with students ability to get access to those in a reasonable way. Also, it would be difficult for the less well funded students who are on financial aid/scholarships in expensive areas.
Please don’t say that the only thing a students can do is study. How many people go to college healthy and come out unhealthy because of that stressful approach.
Three? Four? Am I close?
When business quits requiring college credentials, we may see some common sense return about education. Business would also need to have HR people who came from the business, not college. The last place I worked hired a new HR director who re-wrote job descriptions. Every job then required a college degree. By the time the business closed, the three workers left had associates degrees from the local community college. And we all used what we learned at school. One was the secretary that had a business associate, and the other two architectual/building who took care of the properties.
Ralphie
When business quits requiring college credentials, we may see some common sense return about education
Important– requirement of college degree stems from court rulings that employment exams (writing, basic math, etc) were unconstitutional due to “disparate impact” (that is, fewer blacks than whites passed), and they couldn’t be justified as essential to rhe job… Now, HS diplomas guarantee neither literacy nor any skills, so employers require college degrees in hopes of basic skills. So, college degrees are required for jobs to which they are irrelevant
Nancy,
This is the root of the problem. This is like Catch 22. You must have a college degree, however, any standard of excellence that the degree requires can be challenged as causing a disparate impact. Thus to continue to require the degree the standard of excellence must be removed to avoid the disparate impact. The standard of excellence was the only reason to require the degree in the first place.
This is hopeless. It will destroy the quality of our workforce and the quality of our enterprise organizations. This can not be tolerated. There are minimum rational standards that must not be subjected to this left wing narrative metric looney tune. Anything else is insanity.
https://youtu.be/5yeGMaT3PvI
Regards,
Jim